On one hand, I can understand how mods would fill that flooding a subreddit with joke/meme posts can be disruptive to community discussion. On the other hand, I and many others felt those posts were actually funny. It was only one day during the weekend on an otherwise slow day.

They fit the forum requirements of being about game content. They weren't AdviceAnimal memes or anything like that; they were actual screenshots (well, except for that one photoshopped image of David Braben on Mars with a teacup.)

They were funny for that one day, and I believe that if it had carried on any longer than that, the humor would have been worn out and most would have been downvoted on their own.

You see, communities like this can actually be self-moderating to a degree. I believe we would have collectively reached a point where we said, "Alright, ALRIGHT, enough is enough," and those posts would have subsided on their own, without any interference from mods.

I mean, I get it. You're a mod of a nearly 90,000 user subreddit. You want to do a good job and make sure the community isn't spiraling down the toilet with senseless posts. You feel it's your duty to moderate and keep the subreddit on track. You can do that, but, like raising a child, you can't hold their hand every step of the way. You've gotta step back sometimes and let them do things on their own, for both their sake and yours. Otherwise you're going to be absolutely exhausted trying to control/moderate every aspect of their lives. And I think the same can be said about a community like this.

I'd wager most people in this community are within the 20-35-year age range (obviously with a few outside of that on either end, but that's to be expected.) That seems to be roughly the age demographic here. While I appreciate the mods' efforts to maintain order here, I do feel that they maybe overreached a bit chasing after the ones who started what was basically a harmless prank. I hope I'm not overestimating the abilities of the community here, but I believe we can be mature enough to handle something like this on our own.

The worst that happened was some good content got pushed to the bottom of the subreddit, but I believe most of that eventually found its way to the top anyway when people grew tired of the meme posts on their own and upvoted anything that wasn't another "After X time I got Y" post.

I don't believe anyone should have been banned over it. Maybe a stern warning to cut it out if it persisted longer than a day. As others have already stated, sometimes it's good for a normally pretty serious subreddit to be silly every once in a while. If people didn't find the posts humorous, they wouldn't have been upvoted as much as they were. Also, as others have stated, it brought our community closer in a way. We all got to come together and laugh at ourselves. I'm sure most of us here have posted something like what those posts were teasingly making fun of. That's all it was.

Sorry for typing an essay. Those are my thoughts on the matter.

TL;DR: I believe the mods were maybe a bit too harsh reacting over what amounted to a simple, mostly harmless (heh) prank. After about a day, most of those posts would have been downvoted to oblivion as we, the community, would have gotten tired of it on our own without the need for mod intervention.

Edit: Reworded a couple of points for clarity. Thanks for reading. :)